Wire component transport systems are often employed in the transportation of wire components between wire component processing stations within a manufacturing system. The wire component transport systems employed today often are unchanged from the systems used in the 1940s. These conventional wire component transport systems are often expensive and inefficient. For example, many of the conventional means for transporting wire components involve a worker or a machine placing bundles of wire components prepared at a wire component processing station in a transportable container such as a hopper, tote, bucket or other container. These transportable containers are often transported or hand-delivered by way of carts or conveyor systems or other conventional transport means.
Conventional wire component transport systems introduce several disadvantages to their use. For example, conventional wire component transport systems often employ workers engaging in manual labor. Because of this, the labor costs associated with a conventional wire component transport system may be quite high. Further, because of the manual labor involved in conventional wire component transport systems, there is also the risk of human error associated with the conventional systems as well as possible injuries experienced by workers. Additionally, conventional wire component transport systems often have high Mean Time Between Operations (MTBO). For example, often, after a wire component is processed, the wire component is then bundled and placed in containers/buckets in batches. These batches are then sent to a destination processing station one batch at a time. Because of this, the average time between transports of wire component may be high, adding to lost time and inefficiency as the system waits for the containers or buckets to be sufficiently filled before sending it out. Because of this, conventional wire component transport systems are often inefficient.